Microsoft Drops Prices for Some Azure Instances by Up to 17% | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Drops Prices for Some Azure Instances by Up to 17%

techcrunch.com

100 pointsboulos40 comments

Competition in the cloud space is a beautiful thing. I really hope we don't end up with Amazon being a monopoly provider.

Now if they could all lower network egress pricing I'd be really happy.

I doubt that will happen. Very few people list that as their deal breaker, and it's their entire business model. If egress were cheap you could easily load balance between providers.

"Cheapest cloud hosting service as a service"

Mainframes: IBM - natural monopolist

PC's: Microsoft/Intel - natural monopolists

Mobile: Apple - natural monopolist

Cloud: Amazon - .... (take a guess where this is going)

Mobile: Google Android 70+% (Apple iOS is only 20% worldwide)

Cloud: Amazon, then Digital Ocean is the second, than long nothing, ...(?)..., Azure, ...

Apple iOS is only 20% worldwide

AFAIK, it's <15%.[0]

0. http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-market-share.jsp

>Cloud: Amazon, then Digital Ocean is the second, than long nothing, ...(?)..., Azure, ...

Can you provide some metrics and sources for that?

Who is using Digital Ocean in Europe?!

It is all about AWS and Azure over here.

Since they have a data center in Frankfurt we use it for some stuff. But on the edge for Hetzner vServers.

Apple reaps 100% of the PROFITS. They are effectively a natural monopolist. Who cares about money-losing Android customers??? [praying I don't start some juvenile iOS/Android flame war]

I've never asked this before but why did my post above get so many downvotes??? It's 100% true and not snarky or anything. I'm confused.

Now I want more competitors for platforms like Heroku just so that they can put their prices down. Heroku is great, but it is crazy expensive. Furthermore, I don't see any signs of Heroku lowering their price at all.

Is Heroku really that expensive? I use their new $7/month instances and I have no complaints with performance and features. $50/month for a managed Postgres database is a bit expensive but other cloud storage options like Cloudant (use the service in same AWS region as Heroku) can be very reasonable.

It adds up really fast. $7/month for an instance then $20/month for ssl (even if you don't want the wildcard) and add another $9/month for backend.

$ 36/month in 12 month is $432/month

That is indeed a cheap service. However, relatively expensive for people not making a profit for their projects.

It would be nice if Heroku lowered their prices occasionally as well.

Heroku is expensive when considering you can use similar tools on a vps for a fraction of the cost (or get a whole lot more for your money).

And yeah, when you charge $20 for SSL, you're expensive.

When you have to spend even 10 hours a year maintaining that vps, I think most PaaS pay for themselves.

I'm sorry but at $20/mo for basic SSL, you can easily spend $40/mo on Heroku for ONE app, almost $500/yr!

A private VPS with enough resources for 4 of those same apps would be 2-4X cheaper.

If your time is so valuable that you can waste money like that, congratulations, but many of us find halving a price and learning marketable skills in the process to be valuable.

It's $20/month for basic SSL for custom domains. You can still have SSL at https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com.

If your app is so important that SSL is necessary, that's worth $500/year. Or your app isn't that important and the point is moot.

> Heroku is expensive when considering you can use similar tools on a vps

Do you know what Heroku offers over a VPS? They're not the same thing.

Heroku does not offer much over VPS+Dokku.

For the money, Heroku offers far far less than VPS+Dokku

Speaking as one of the Dokku maintainers, that is a false statement.

Security, true isolation, the ability to easily scale horizontally and vertically, integrations into many services are all things Heroku offers that you need to work hard for in Dokku. Disregarding the fact that you need to maintain your own server(s) with Dokku, Heroku is tthe clear winner here.

The only thing Dokku offers people is the ability to save some money at the cost of their own time. Sure, I can manage just fine as I was maintaining my own servers anyhow - and know how - but honestly I already have a dayjob, why would I want to make my programming hobby more work?

I front end with Cloudflare to get HTTPS.

I have probably spent a thousand (paid) hours doing devops for customers. For my own projects I don't want to spend the time.

It's expensive if you need decent performance - Isolated Dynos (i.e. running in their own EC2 instance) start at $250/month. We found that the shared Dyno options had significant noisy-neighbour problems.

Got a 4 core, 3GB ram server I pay <$7/month (paid yearly) on a reputable low end host, so yes it is expensive

Which hosting provider?

I think he might have been sarcastic with his statement.

Out of curiosity, is there much of a performance hit using Cloudant vs a Heroku managed DB?

Not much if you are in the same AWS region.

Am I only one who is experiencing terrible speed of Azure CDN?

http://imgur.com/2pAzabn

http://imgur.com/xiymJUt

That's the Azure.com website's CDN, but I can check on that.

There are a lot of great services Azure offers and I would absolutely love to throw my money at Microsoft...but not all of it. I find it crazy that their SLA on VMs only applies if you have two VMs. Essentially, you are having to pay double just to maybe get 99.95% connectivity.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/virtual-...

Any type of high availability requires multiple servers

I don't have a use-case for Azure, but very happy MS are in the space.

Like you I don't have any valid use case right now, but I'm interested in Service Fabric[1] though. It looks like Amazon Lambda, it screams vendor lock-in but much less than Lambda, as it seems easier to code and import dlls

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/service-fabric/

Things are really going to pick up when interconnections between clouds becomes faster and easier. AWS's switch to VPC is actually moving this along nicely.

Many people actually want to be in two clouds for redundancy.

Dear Azure team: you will be more awesome if you offer Linux VM running natively on Linux Host, more developers will come.

What difference does the host make? You're not interacting directly with it anyway, as far as I know.

If your Windows host need Windows update, then all the Linux guests would need to be rebooted (but seems they've managed to reduce the number of reboot significantly since last year). But regarding the performance and security, most people using Linux still prefer a Linux VM host.

Wow, not really. If perf is fine who cares about the hypervisor. Regarding reboots, if they are using hyper-v they are probably on top ofServer Core which minimises patch surface and thus reboots.

I guess this is the new field in what they want to try to venture more into. I think the CEO was the former cloud head so no doubt its apart of his strategy

Azure is like 8 years old at this point, so it's by no means a new field for them. It's just that before there was no Google forcing everyone to cut their crazy fat margins.

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